Policy Studies

ISSN: 0144-2872 (Print) 1470-1006 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cpos20

The real fourth estate? Portrayals of Trump’s rise

in the foreign media of friendly countries

Zim Nwokora, Benjamin Isakhan & Chengxin Pan

To cite this article: Zim Nwokora, Benjamin Isakhan & Chengxin Pan (2020): The real fourth
estate? Portrayals of Trump’s rise in the foreign media of friendly countries, Policy Studies

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2020.1771297

Published online: 26 May 2020.

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POLICY STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2020.1771297

The real fourth estate? Portrayals of Trump’s rise in the foreign

media of friendly countries
a a,b a
Zim Nwokora , Benjamin Isakhan and Chengxin Pan
a
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia; bDepartment of Politics and
International Relations, Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg, South Africa

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

That the news media should operate as an impartial and responsible Received 3 August 2018
“fourth estate” in a democracy is a pervasive ideal, but there are Accepted 12 May 2020
serious obstacles – economic, organizational and political – to its
KEYWORDS
achievement in practice. These obstacles, we argue, may be lower Media; fourth estate;
when an outlet reports on politics in another country, which is comparative media systems;
strategically allied to its own. And, for this reason, the quality of Donald Trump;
news coverage of that country’s politics may be higher in the communication theory
reporting by foreign media outlets than in the reporting by
domestic outlets. This article outlines the theory behind this
conjecture and then examines it empirically through a content
analysis of media representations of Donald Trump’s rise in two
non-American outlets, The Australian and The Guardian. Their
coverage, our analysis suggests, approximated fourth-estate ideals
more closely than did the domestic coverage of Trump’s rise.

The “fourth estate” model dominates thinking about how individual journalists ought to
behave and how the media system as a whole ought to function (e.g. Baker 1998; Castells
2013; Deuze 2005; Keane 2013; Kovach and Rosenstiel 2007; Mellado and Van Dalen 2014;
Schultz 1998). According to this model, the media should play the role of watchdog in the
political system, keeping a keen, critical but fair eye on governments and the political
establishment. In so doing, it promotes accountability by informing citizens about govern-
ment activity and forcing politicians to explain their choices. While this model captures
what many think of as the proper role of the media in a democracy, it is often viewed
as being unachievable in practice due to government interference, market pressure, and
the political preferences of journalists and media proprietors.
This article extends this agenda of research on the fourth estate model. Much of this lit-
erature explains why fourth estate behaviour is unlikely (e.g. Baker 1998; Castells 2013;
Schultz 1998). In contrast, we investigate the question of when (i.e. under what circum-
stances) fourth estate behaviour may nonetheless arise. In exploring this issue we do not
argue against the conventional view that fourth estate behaviour is unusual. But, with only
a few exceptions (e.g. Mellado and Van Dalen 2014; Reich 2012), there has been little con-
sideration of the possibility that the “quality” of news reporting – that is, how closely it cor-
responds to fourth estate ideals – may vary across an outlet’s news-production sections. If this

CONTACT Zim Nwokora z.nwokora@deakin.edu.au 221 Burwood Highway, Victoria 3125, Australia
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 Z. NWOKORA ET AL.

is the case, however, then some sections may produce relatively high quality news while the
outlet as a whole produces a lower quality output. Building on this observation, we argue that
foreign news sections in particular, when they report on politics in a friendly country, are
well-positioned to produce high-quality news. This means, in other words, that the reporting
of foreign news is more likely to fulfil the normative aims embodied in the fourth estate
model. And, we argue, this is because foreign correspondents are somewhat protected
from the obstacles that undermine news quality across the outlet as a whole.
We flesh out this argument theoretically and explore it empirically through a case study
of foreign media coverage of Donald Trump’s rise to the Republican presidential nomina-
tion in 2016. Trump’s victory in that race was one of the great surprises in the history of
American presidential nominations (Graham 2016). And the media played a critical role
in fuelling his rise (Azari 2016; Lawrence and Boydstun 2017; Wells et al. 2016). While
giving Trump disproportionate attention, the media also cast him more positively than
we would expect had their practices approximated fourth estate standards (Patterson
2016a, 2016b; Wells et al. 2016). The empirical question we consider, then, is whether
foreign coverage of Trump’s rise, from outlets based in US allies, adopted a more
policy-centred, critical and less deferential slant. Examining coverage from The Australian
and The Guardian, we find evidence to support this conjecture.
The remainder of the article is organized into five sections. In the first section we
discuss the fourth estate model and identify the obstacles that militate against its trans-
lation into practice. In the second section we argue that several of these obstructions
may be absent, or reduced, when a country’s politics is reported on by outlets from
another, friendly country. We explore this argument empirically in the subsequent sec-
tions by examining the presentation of Trump’s rise in The Australian and The Guardian.
Drawing on previous studies (e.g. Azari 2016; Leetaru and Sides 2016; Patterson 2016a,
2016b), the third section summarizes the salient features of the domestic (i.e. American)
media coverage of Trump’s rise; and we use these established findings as benchmarks
against which the foreign coverage can be compared.
The fourth section details the method of content analysis we use to examine the foreign
coverage of Trump’s rise. In brief, we coded over 800 articles while assuming that attention
to policy issues – instead of the standing of the candidates in the race (i.e. the “horserace”)
– gives an indication of the quality of news coverage of a nominating campaign (see also
Flowers, Haynes, and Crespin 2003; Steger 2015; Norrander 2010). The fifth section dis-
cusses our results, which are consistent with the suspicion that the foreign media in
friendly countries are able to avoid some of the constraints that reduce the quality of dom-
estic news. Specifically, we find that the foreign media concentrated more on policy, and
less on the horserace, than did the domestic media. The conclusion summarizes the pre-
ceding discussion and identifies some issues it raises that warrant further research.

In search of the fourth estate

There is a widespread view that the media ought to be the “watchdog” of governments and
the political establishment. They should, amongst other things, reveal suspicious official
activity; scrutinize the masses of information that governments release; inform and
educate the public about political issues; and screen aspirants for office (e.g. Castells
2013; Deuze 2005; Kovach and Rosenstiel 2007; Schultz 1998). These expectations are
 POLICY STUDIES 3

embodied in depictions of the media as a fourth estate that is separate from the three main
branches of government (i.e. executive, legislative and judicial) but charged with holding
them to account. We apply this model as the normative benchmark for assessing the
quality of news reporting. The remainder of this section elaborates the concept of the
fourth estate and discusses its application as a normative benchmark in political com-
munication research. Later, in a subsequent section on empirical methods, we explain
our approach to measuring news quality in terms of this model.

An evolving concept
Edmund Burke used the term “fourth estate” in the late eighteenth century to describe the
role of the press in British parliamentary democracy, and, in particular, the gallery where
journalists sat while they recorded proceedings of the House of Commons. But the
meaning and application of the concept has evolved considerably since then. This
reflects the fact that the “fourth estate”, as a concept, is bound up with notions of “politics”
and “the political” (e.g. Keane 2013; Schultz 1998). And as the latter have morphed, and
more specifically widened (Keane 2013, 58), so too has the scope of the “fourth estate”. The
term is now used “flexibly” to capture the media’s role in “scrutinizing those in positions of
power and influence”, who may or may not be elected officeholders (Schultz 1998, 2). For
example, Mellado (2015) defines the fourth-estate role to include an orientation against
power-holders of all kinds, and, likewise, John Keane (2013, 58) argues that fourth-
estate scrutiny should be extended to public figures who have become “unelected represen-
tatives” of issue agendas. Blumler and Coleman (2015) explain that the civic ideals associ-
ated with the fourth estate model continue to be relevant and popular even though (as we
explain below) the modern media environment makes their achievement more difficult.
The focus of this article – namely, the American presidential nominating process, the
first of the two-stage process for electing the president – falls beyond the governmental
arena that the original fourth-estate theorists had in mind. However, electoral processes
are fundamental to (democratic) politics because they are crucial mechanisms for selecting
political leaders, holding them to account and, at a systemic level, for legitimating (and
therefore stabilizing) the regime (e.g. Sartori 1987, 86). But elections can perform these
functions only if, and to the extent that, the media supplies a conducive informational
environment. To do this, the media need to do more than simply relay what the establish-
ment politicians want their popular audience to hear. On the contrary, the media enable
functional elections by educating the public about policy issues, which is a requirement for
deliberative participation (e.g. Baker 1998; Keane 1992; Morlino 2004; Strömbäck 2005).
As Blumler and Coleman (2015, 113) note, this function may require the media to high-
light “what is substantively at stake” on issues that have been neglected by the mainstream
political parties. The media also perform an important screening function during election
campaigns by spreading information about “the good” and “the bad” politicians, which
enables citizens to make better informed choices about the character of the candidates
(e.g. Besley and Prat 2006). The media’s role in performing these civic functions has
become more important since the 1990s (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999), due to factors
such as declining trust in political elites and political parties and the growing individua-
lization and sophistication of the citizenry. These trends have reduced the willingness
of mass publics to accept communicational directives from established political figures,
4 Z. NWOKORA ET AL.

and increased their need for alternative sources of information to guide their political
decision-making.1

The fourth estate as an evaluative standard

The fourth estate concept has been widely used in empirical research as a benchmark to
facilitate comparison of news outlets and countries’ media systems (e.g. Hallin and
Mancini 2004; Noam 2016; Norris 2000). Recent research has developed this line of
inquiry further by comparing journalists against fourth estate standards (Mellado and
Van Dalen 2014; Reich 2012), and, specifically, whether their performance varies across
occupational roles. Many (but not all) journalists have a specialism or “news beat”, with
political reporting sometimes regarded as being more “thorough, proactive and
complex” than other beats and thus more consistent with fourth estate standards (Reich
2012, 80). Testing this idea through interviews of Israeli journalists, Reich (2012) finds
that political journalists do, typically, apply more rigorous techniques than journalists
with a finance or territorial beat. For example, political reporters rely on a greater
number of sources; they are more likely to discount official stories (i.e. public relations)
from the organizations they investigate; and they obtain more of their information
from leaks.
Although political reporting may have higher standards than other kinds of journalism,
this does not mean it gets close to fourth estate ideals. In fact, Mellado and Van Dalen
(2014) find, using survey data from Chile, that political journalists are more aware
(than other beat clusters) of the gap between the ideals of the press as a fourth estate
and what journalists actually do in practice. At the same time, many studies explore the
reasons why the practice of political journalism falls short of fourth estate ideals (e.g.
Hallin and Mancini 2004; Gentzkow, Glaeser, and Goldin 2006; Gentzkow and Shapiro
2010; Noam 2016; Schultz 1998; though see Norris (2000) for the case against the
“media malaise” thesis). The most serious threat comes from the entity that journalists
should, ideally, challenge above all others, namely, the government. Since media portrayals
influence citizens’ opinions (e.g. Herman and Chomsky 1988; Schudson 2002), govern-
ments have at least some incentive to interfere in news production; but by doing so
they make it impossible for journalists to perform a fourth estate role. Even when a gov-
ernment does not try to overtly control the media, it may seek to influence its content
more subtly. For instance, with the press “congenitally dependent on government
sources” (Zaller 1992, 316), the government might manage information flows to encou-
rage “good behaviour” by journalists (see also Besley and Prat 2006).2
While the prospect of controlling news content may be tempting, how governments
actually behave in the face of this temptation is a rather different matter. The empirical
evidence on this point reveals striking contrasts between countries (and over time
within countries) in the extent of government interference in the media (Noam 2016).
In most established democracies, the media operates largely independently of the govern-
ment (though the extent of government criticism varies considerably across countries, as
Van Dalen (2012) shows). In autocracies and fledgling democracies, however, govern-
ments exert more control over media operations, which is why independence is “probably
the most important dimension to distinguish media systems on a global scale” (Brügge-
man et al. 2014, 1041).
 POLICY STUDIES 5

Fourth estate standards are impossible without media independence, but an indepen-
dent media does not guarantee fourth estate behaviour. One constraint is the preferences
of media personnel. Elaborations of the fourth estate model assume that media personnel,
or at least the “professionals” among them, are sceptics who want to challenge power-
holders. But, in practice, media actors have always had multifaceted role conceptions
(Mellado and Van Dalen 2014), and often avowedly political goals (Patterson and Dons-
bach 1996). Many journalists, editors and proprietors are drawn to the industry precisely
because it provides opportunities to promote their issue and partisan preferences – this is
why, historically, political parties and politicians in the United States and Western Europe
became proprietors of media outlets (Schudson 2002).
Market imperatives may also drive a wedge between media practice and fourth estate
standards (e.g. Blumler and Kavanagh 1999; Gentzkow, Glaeser, and Goldin 2006;
Mellado and Van Dalen 2014; Schultz 1998; Zaller 1999). While media organizations
(with the exception of public broadcasters) have always been constrained by the bottom
line, analysts note that competitive pressures have increased since the 1990s. Some of
the factors driving this trend include the spread of the internet, which has enabled the
growth of alternative news and entertainment platforms; the greater sophistication of
market research which has enabled media organizations and advertizers to target consu-
mer behaviour more effectively; and the declining reputation of politics, which has meant
that political news coverage “must fight for its place in reporting and scheduling on the
basis of its news value or likely audience appeal” (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999, 218). In
this transformed media setting, producing high-quality news is usually less profitable
than producing low-quality news, owing to the costs of generating quality (e.g. probing
investigations and in-depth analyses) but also the greater demand for “infotainment”.
Closely related to growing competitive pressure is, in many countries, increasing
market concentration of the media industry (Noam 2016), which can also have impli-
cations for quality. High concentration does not necessarily undermine news quality,
but it does create certain vulnerabilities – because of the media system’s dependence on
a few major players. If these outlets fall into the hands of proprietors who are politically
ambitious or aggressive profit-seekers, as has happened in Australia (Papandrea and Tiffen
2016), the result will be a lower-quality media system than would have been the case under
a more fragmented ownership structure.

The real fourth estate? Foreign media in friendly countries

The media/politics scholarship devotes more attention to explaining why we should not
expect journalistic practice to conform to the fourth estate model than to understanding
the circumstances that do foster such standards. This is the issue we explore in the remain-
der of this article. Following previous studies (Mellado and Van Dalen 2014; Reich 2012),
we highlight the importance of differences between journalistic specialisms. In particular,
we argue that a particular subset of beat journalists, namely foreign correspondents, are
well-positioned to produce relatively high-quality news. As a consequence, news quality
may be unusually high when an outlet reports on the politics of a foreign country. This
expectation is especially plausible, we contend, when an outlet reports on the politics of
a country that is allied to its own – in other words, these countries have “friendly” inter-
national relations. We elaborate both claims below, drawing on the media/politics
6 Z. NWOKORA ET AL.

scholarship and research on international relations. In subsequent sections, we examine

this conjecture empirically by analysing foreign news coverage of Donald Trump’s rise
to the Republican presidential nomination.

Covering politics at home and away

Our suspicion that foreign outlets are likely to be a source of high quality news follows
from observing that several of the conventional constraints on quality may be reduced
when an outlet reports on political events in another country (i.e. an “away” location)
as compared with its reporting of events at “home”. This is because, in most countries,
the media market is primarily a national (or intra-national) system (Gentzkow, Glaeser,
and Goldin 2006; Jingrong 2010). Although media consumers tend to have more interest
in raw entertainment than in public affairs (e.g. Sartori 1989; Zaller 1999), when they do
want to know about the latter, they are mostly drawn to events, trends and personalities at
home. News producers also concentrate on the home front, with “standard operating pro-
cedures” set up to cater to domestic politics (Sigal 1978).
In turn, the domestic focus of news consumption and production reflects the fact that
politics is primarily a “national”, and oftentimes “local”, business (Kinder and Kiewiet
1981; Zaller 1992). Citizens’ evaluations of politicians and governments, and their
voting behaviour, are mainly driven by domestic considerations, such as the performance
of the (national) economy (Lewis-Beck, Nadeau, and Foucault 2013). Anticipating this cal-
culus, political officeholders and aspirants concentrate their messaging on domestic issues
(Vavreck 2009). Politics in another country is not normally central to citizens’ thoughts or
elite posturing – in fact, away politics seems to matter only if, and to the extent that, it
impacts on home politics. Of course, politicians and governments may attempt to high-
light a foreign issue to draw attention away from their domestic problems. But, the evi-
dence suggests (e.g. Volgy and Schwarz 1991), this strategy will be most effective when
the foreign issue can be connected, in the public mind, to domestic considerations,
which again confirms that the home front is the locus of political attention and activity.
The fact that domestic politics occupies centre stage in the news cycle has implications
for how media outlets are organized. They typically concentrate their resources – includ-
ing the number of journalists; space in newspapers and online platforms; and time on tele-
vision – to covering domestic politics. And when an outlet is under pressure to boost its
ratings or advertising revenue, foreign news reporting often faces acute scrutiny. Overall,
this has meant that “With the exception of events with the highest worldwide relevance
(e.g. 9/11), there is declining space available for foreign news” (Altmeppen 2010, 576).
Beyond the bottom line, a focus on domestic politics also makes sense for politically
ambitious proprietors and editors. Their outlets are likely to have greater agenda-setting
power at home than abroad because, as Sevenans (2018) explains, the various mechanisms
of media influence are anchored in domestic variables (see also Herman and Chomsky
1988). Moreover, if editors and proprietors form their political preferences in much the
same way that ordinary citizens do, they are likely to be mainly concerned about
matters at home. Thus, from a purely political perspective, outlets are likely to be more
effective and invested in their domestic context.
Given these incentives, it is reasonable to view the reporting of foreign politics as a non-
essential activity, or luxury, for most media outlets. Unsurprisingly, therefore, even in
 POLICY STUDIES 7

large, rich countries like the United States, the number of outlets that maintain a dedicated
group of foreign politics specialists has been “very small indeed” (Cohen 1963, 9; see also
Hannerz 2004, 5). These outlets are all major institutions – including, for instance, the
ABC and The Australian in Australia; the BBC and The Guardian in the United
Kingdom; and CNN and The New York Times in the United States – with considerable
financial resources. They can afford the luxury of serious foreign news reporting, while
outlets with fewer resources purchase more limited foreign content from news agencies
such as Reuters and the Associated Press. Indeed, investing in foreign news may actually
be less expensive for the major outlets than for minor outlets, because it helps to shore up
their “high quality” reputation which is so crucial to their market position.
So, what are the conditions at foreign affairs desks and in overseas bureaus? These jour-
nalists, compared to their colleagues who report on domestic politics, face fewer direct
competitors. Journalists in Country A who report on Country B are separated from the
crowd of Country A journalists reporting on Country A politics, but also from Country
B journalists reporting on Country B politics. Their real rivals are the other journalists
who report on Country B politics for a Country A audience. This will certainly be a
small group; and given the prestige of (many) foreign postings and the outlets that hire
these journalists, it is likely to acquire the trappings of a high status club much like a coun-
try’s diplomatic corps (Reich 2012), including a strong professional ethos and competition
over quality rather than costs.
Just as importantly, foreign correspondents may receive less oversight from the man-
agement of their organizations since they are an exclusive group; they perform functions
that are at the periphery of their outlet’s core business; and their members are often
abroad. As Julianne Schultz (1998, 6) notes, journalists and managers are often at odds
regarding the importance of fourth estate norms: journalists tend to be “insistent advo-
cates” of the fourth estate model, while their managers prefer “a more compliant, more
entertaining and less critical approach”. Thus, insulated from managerial pressure,
foreign correspondents are better placed (than reporters of domestic politics) to do
“proper journalism”.3

The media in international relations

The foreign media’s distance from the country whose politics it covers, we contend,
improves its perspective and the quality of its reporting. But, crucially, this will be the
case only when an outlet reports on politics in a friendly country, that is, one that is
allied to its own country. In this situation, foreign correspondents and outlets can
operate as reasonably objective reporters of news. Friendly relations between the home
and away countries mean that, generally, foreign media will not be pressured by their
home government to put a slant on their reporting to advance their country’s geopolitical
goals (e.g. Cohen 1963; Gilboa 2001). At the same time, the government and political
establishment of the away country will be less fearful of these outlets, and thus more pre-
pared to engage with their personnel in a way that enables effective and accurate reporting
(Nye 2008).
By contrast, when foreign outlets report on politics from a country with a hostile
relationship to their home country – that is, an unfriendly country – they are less likely
to deliver high quality news, primarily because of pressure from their home government
8 Z. NWOKORA ET AL.

and political establishment (Cohen 1963; Gilboa 2001). The standing of governments, and
the legitimacy of the regimes they lead, are bound up with how foreign political systems
are perceived. So, consistent with rational actor models of international politics (e.g.
Kahler 1998), governments deploy their country’s media like other resources, to
advance and secure their interests. Journalists may be encouraged, and perhaps even
forced, to become active players in “the critical battle for the minds of people in countries
with hostile governments” (Gilboa 2001, 5). As well as depicting the home country favour-
ably, they may be expected to depict politics in an away country in simplistic terms, down-
play the merits of its political system, and exaggerate (or invent) tales to show up its
weaknesses. More subtly, governments may also seek to foster an environment, among
foreign correspondents, where nationalism is cast as the ultimate value – which means,
of course, that it should trump a journalist’s commitment to professional norms.
Collaboration between governments and the media was a feature of the Cold War,
leading observers such as Cohen (1963, 7) to view the media as “a sort of intelligence
agent” in the rivalry between the United States (and West) and the Soviet Union (and
East) (see also Gilboa 2001). From this perspective, the West appeared to face a structural
disadvantage because core Western values such as democracy, liberalism and openness
limited the capacity of governments to effectively “deploy” the media. More recently,
the rise of China also raises questions about government-media relations. Long suspicious
of the United States’s soft power advantage, the Chinese government has begun to use the
media to attempt to close this gap (Grigg 2017). One strategy has been the effort to cast
China and its ambitions in a positive light, while another has been to depict America nega-
tively (Bastin 2016; Pan, Isakhan, and Nwokora 2020).
To summarize, we have argued that news quality depends on who is covering what –
and, specifically, that outlets from a foreign but friendly country are well-positioned to
present a country’s politics in ways that are consistent with fourth estate ideals. This is
a novel theoretical conjecture about how the media “works” across political settings.
Thus, our aim in this article is to present a detailed elaboration of it. The previous
section fleshed it out in general terms, drawing on relevant literatures. As Gerring
(2012) suggests, a useful way to progress from this basis is to examine a case study that
illustrates and particularizes the general claims. This is the approach we follow. By analys-
ing how foreign media presented Donald Trump’s rise to become the Republican nominee
for president, we reveal how their choices about content and tone resulted in coverage that
was quite different from that supplied by domestic outlets, and more consistent with
fourth estate ideals.

The rise of Trump as a case study of foreign media reporting

At the Republican National Convention in July 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio, Donald J. Trump
became the party’s official candidate for the forthcoming presidential election. Since
modern presidential elections have usually been close-run affairs, securing the nomination
guaranteed candidate Trump an excellent shot at winning the presidency. For our analysis,
then, we consider Trump’s political rise as spanning from when he announced his candi-
dacy and observers began to speculate in a serious way about his prospects until the
Republican convention, when his nomination was confirmed. Trump’s rise can provide
a useful case to explore the account of media politics developed in the previous section,
 POLICY STUDIES 9

for two reasons. First, the Republican primary season was high profile and received close
attention from foreign outlets, so there is an adequate source base to ground a content
analysis of such coverage. Second, although the 2016 Republican primaries are very
recent history, scholarly examinations of this contest have already begun to appear,
including studies that analyse how the domestic media covered the race. The findings
from this work can be used as a baseline to compare and evaluate foreign media coverage.
So, rather than replicating the analyses of these studies, we take their findings as given and
concentrate our attention on the foreign media outputs. The impression supplied by the
domestic media is summarized below, and we integrate specific findings from the research
on this topic into our discussion of results.

Source material
Our empirical analysis is centred on a content analysis of newspaper articles from The
Australian and The Guardian, which are major outlets based in Australia and the
United Kingdom (UK), respectively. Both newspapers devoted considerable resources to
covering the 2016 Republican primaries, and thus produced a sizeable output mapping
Trump’s rise. With the assistance of two research assistants and the Factiva search
engine, we collated all of the articles published in these newspapers that (a) included
the words “Donald Trump” and (b) discussion of the presidential race. This search was
restricted to just over a calendar year: from 16 June 2015, when Trump announced his
candidacy, to 22 July 2016, the day after the Republican convention. Following these
steps yielded a sample of 854 articles. The Guardian coverage proved to be much more
extensive than that of The Australian, and contributed 85 per cent (728 articles) of the
sample.

Domestic media coverage

Since Australia and the UK are both strong and longstanding allies of the United States, we
contend, following the account of the previous section, that The Australian and The Guar-
dian will have supplied high quality coverage of Trump’s rise, especially when compared
to domestic coverage. But how did the domestic media cover the Republican primaries?
And how should we understand the quality (in fourth estate terms) of its coverage? The
research that focuses squarely on these questions suggests that the US media fuelled
Trump’s rise (Azari 2016; Lawrence and Boydstun 2017; Leetaru and Sides 2016; Patterson
2016a, 2016b; Wells et al. 2016). This work also makes observations about the content and
quality of coverage including that: the media devoted most of its attention to the competi-
tive standing of the candidates, or the “horserace” (Patterson 2016a), and it engaged in a
surprisingly low level of critical analysis of candidate Trump in particular, partly because
of its focus on the horserace but also because of the Trump campaign’s success in mana-
ging the news cycle (Wells et al. 2016).
Thus, these reflections suggest that, in its coverage of Trump’s rise, the domestic media,
on the whole (but not in all cases), fell short of fourth estate standards of responsible jour-
nalism. It might be argued, of course, that there is nothing new about this and that high-
quality journalism is extremely difficult in the modern, primary-driven nomination
process. Nonetheless, Trump’s rise does seem to be a glaring example of
10 Z. NWOKORA ET AL.

underperformance. Traditionally, the media have devoted little attention to outsider can-
didates unless, and until, they “beat expectations” by performing impressively in one of the
early contests (e.g. Norrander 2010; Steger 2015). But this rule was broken in 2016, and the
domestic media stoked attention that may have equated to $2 billion worth of free adver-
tising for Trump (Patterson 2016a, 6), giving his campaign a level of credibility it would
have lacked in most previous cycles (assuming that Trump would have received the same
treatment as did other candidates).
Explanations of the distinctive pattern of coverage in 2016 cite Trump’s personal ability
to dominate the news cycle through controversial interviews, rallies, press conferences and
Twitter announcements; but also the erosion of citizens’ trust of the media, which created
a favourable context for “bare-knuckle authenticity” (Wells et al. 2016, 670). But, whatever
the relative importance of these factors, the key point for our purposes is the evidence of
low quality domestic coverage of Trump’s rise. Can the same be said for the foreign media:
what was the quality of its coverage of Trump’s rise? We explore this question through a
content analysis of the sample of articles from The Australian and The Guardian. Our
working hypothesis, which follows from our earlier account of media politics, is that we
should expect markedly different, and higher quality, coverage from these foreign outlets.

Method of analysis
A variety of approaches have been used to analyse the content of media articles (e.g. Weber
1985; Lacy et al. 2015). In some research, content is analysed by a computer programme,
which is an especially effective way to capture how frequently various keywords are used.
But since the communication of meaning, intention and context is difficult to tap with
even the most sophisticated of algorithms, analysis by human coders is often still regarded
as the “gold standard” (Lacy et al. 2015, 10). Unfortunately, human coding is laborious and
expensive. Moreover, it is prone to inconsistency. The severity of the inconsistency
problem depends, however, on the nature of the search and in particular whether it
aims to identify “manifest” or “latent” content (Krippendorff 2004).
A search for manifest content aims to identify explicit, or objective, information. Thus,
the criteria for classification can be clearly listed and applied, and we should expect a very
high level of consistency across articles (and across coders, if multiple coders are used).
Indeed, if the coding criteria are fit for purpose, any inconsistency should be considered
an error since it must be due to misapplication of the criteria. On the other hand, a
search for latent content aims to capture interpretative, or implicit, meaning. Although
much of the important information that an article communicates may be latent, there
is a high risk of inconsistency, especially across coders, when such content is analysed
because it relies on the coder to make the critical judgment calls. Any discrepancies
between multiple coders cannot be treated as errors in this circumstance since they actu-
ally reflect different judgments about subjective material.
Several indicators have been devised which estimate the extent of inter-coder reliability
(e.g. Krippendorff 2004; Lacy et al. 2015; Weber 1985). While these measures provide a
way to gauge the extent of subjectivity, they do not, ultimately, resolve the problem of
what score, or classification, should be entered when a single entry is required. Sometimes
it is possible to compute an average score, but the resulting input may capture poorly the
distribution of scores. Other times, an average score cannot be computed; and in such
 POLICY STUDIES 11

cases, a common practice seems to be that the article author acts as an umpire when mul-
tiple coders (often research assistants) disagree, which means, of course, that her/his judg-
ment is privileged ahead of all others. In short, there is no unproblematic way to aggregate
the basic scores from multiple coders.
The crux of the problem, as we see it, is the latency of the content, which necessitates
multiple coders and implies that their coding cannot be “wrong”. For our analysis of the
Trump media articles, we adopt an approach that aims to avoid the serious challenges of
dealing with latent content by focusing on, and drawing inferences from, the articles’
manifest content. Based on an initial screening of the articles, we developed a classification
scheme that can be used to code the data in a reasonably objective manner. In so doing, we
aimed to shift the complex judgments and any arbitrariness from the coder to the design of
the classification scheme, which should be straightforward to then apply.
The coding scheme is applied to each article and operates at two levels: first, and most
importantly, we distinguish between (1) articles that focus on the horserace (i.e. the can-
didates’ standing in the race) and (2) articles that focus on candidates’ positions on issues
(which also includes discussion of what a candidacy might mean for the direction of public
policy). These categories are commonly used to study election-related media coverage (e.g.
Norrander 2010; Steger 2015). Moreover, they are reasonably obvious. In the event of any
uncertainty about the classification of an article, the focus of the article title (and then sub-
title) was considered – if these focused on the horserace (rather than issues), for instance,
the article was deemed to be primarily about the horserace.
This horserace/issues distinction relates closely to the quality of media coverage, with
scholars regularly criticizing the media for focusing too little on issues and too much
on the horserace (e.g. Norrander 2010; Patterson 2016a, 2016b; Steger 2015). Of course,
a presidential nominating contest is, essentially, a race with a grand prize at the end.
Horserace coverage therefore provides insights into a central element of the contest.
But in order for political parties and the media to perform important normative functions,
such as enabling debate about serious public policy questions, it is also crucial for issues to
be debated by the candidates and aired in the media. The problem, experience suggests, is
that there is a general tendency, in the media, to focus too much on the horserace and too
little on issues. This may be because horserace coverage is usually more dramatic (and
therefore has greater potential market appeal) than issue coverage; and it lends itself
more easily to established frames, which reduces the costs of generating content. Nonethe-
less, this crowding out of issue coverage has detrimental effects on the capacity of the
media to perform an explanatory function that is consistent with fourth-estate ideals,
which in turn has consequences for the quality of political debate and candidate assess-
ment. Given such observations, we assume, like previous studies, that the extent of
focus on issues (compared to the horserace) is a reasonable indication of the quality of
media coverage. Our scoring of the data in such terms can be compared to the coding
of the horserace/issue content of US domestic media coverage of the Republican race in
2016 (Leetaru and Sides 2016; Patterson 2016a, 2016b).
The articles within the issues/horserace categories can be subdivided further, into
various frames that capture how an article presented Trump’s standing in the horserace
or in relation to broader issues of public policy, which matters because there are associ-
ations between these frames and the slant (pro-/anti-Trump) of an article, as we
explain in a moment. Furthermore, the various issue subclasses, in particular, can help
12 Z. NWOKORA ET AL.

to reveal what were the most pressing concerns of the foreign journalists who were cover-
ing the Republican race. As noted earlier, the foreign press caters to an audience – obser-
vers of Country B who live in Country A – that is quite different from that of the domestic
media in their home country or the domestic press in the foreign country. The captive
audience for the foreign press is likely to be small relative to the potential audience for
the domestic media (in either country), yet this group is likely to include government
and opposition politicians; bureaucrats from the foreign policy departments; think tank
researchers; and business strategists within transnational corporations. So by examining
how the foreign media present issues we can gain some sense of the worldviews of this
foreign policy establishment, which the media promotes and reflects.
The newspaper articles that deal with the horserace are classified into: (1a) articles that
“talk up” Trump’s chances (in the Republican primaries or in the forthcoming election)
and (1b) articles that “talk down” or dismiss Trump’s chances. The “issue” articles are
classified into five sub-groups: (2a) articles that focus on the authenticity, and freshness,
of Trump’s candidacy against the backdrop of a dysfunctional political system;4 (2b)
those that raise concerns about the future of American democracy because of what candi-
date Trump represents; (2c) those that focus on Trump’s relationship to particular groups
in the electorate (e.g. Muslims, immigrants and women); (2d) those that discuss the can-
didate’s policy proposals (e.g. on energy or the economy), without mentioning a particular
group; and (2e) articles on international relations that discuss foreign leaders’ views of
Trump, or Trump’s views of them. Table 1 below summarizes this classification
scheme, and examples of the indicators used to categorize the articles in our sample.
As Table 1 suggests, each of the subclasses is associated with a slant, or orientation,
towards Trump and his campaign. Though there are exceptions, articles in subclasses
1a and 2a are generally pro-Trump, which is to say they cast Trump’s candidacy in a posi-
tive light. For instance, in mid-March 2016, an article (classified as 1a) in The Guardian
contrasted the vibrancy of Trump’s campaign with the gloom around Marco Rubio whose
exit was imminent (Chalabi 2016). On the other hand, articles that fall within the other

Table 1. The classification scheme.

Frame
Class Subclass Indicative terms Slant
1: Horserace 1a: Talking up Trump campaign is “winning”; “gaining ground”; “victory”; “surging” Positive
Trump candidacy “momentum”
1b: Talking down Trump Trump campaign is “losing”; “defeat”; “loss of momentum” or Negative
candidacy “setback”; a Trump competitor “emboldened” or “rising steadily”
2: Issue 2a: Authenticity of Trump Trump as the choice of the “silent/forgotten majority”; Trump as a Positive
solution to “political correctness”; Trump as leader of “insurgency
against the political establishment”
2b: Trump and American Trump’s rise as evidence of “failings” or “failure” of American (or Negative
democracy Western) democracy; American democracy has become a “joke”;
“dysfunctional party system” or “political leadership”; Trump
compared with autocratic leader (e.g. Chavez, Mussolini)
2c: Trump and particular Trump’s “ugly” treatment of particular groups, including “Muslims”, Negative
groups “women”, “African Americans”, “Mexican Americans”
2d: Trump’s policies Trump’s “anti-immigration stance”; “foreign policy”; “economic Negative
policy”; “environmental policy”
2e: Trump in international Trump comments on a foreign leader (e.g. “Putin”); or foreign Negative
relations country or region (e.g. “EU”); or foreign political process (e.g.
“Brexit”); or foreign leader’s comments regarding Trump
 POLICY STUDIES 13

subclasses, namely 1b, 2b, 2c, 2d and 2e, tend to portray Trump negatively. For instance,
an article (coded 1b) in The Guardian, published on 6 August 2015, confidently predicted
that Trump’s presidential campaign would soon run out of steam, even though his
“success now might seem baffling”.5 To make sense of Trump’s campaign in 2016, this
article suggests, it should be compared to those of Rudy Giuliani and Michele Bachman
four years earlier – they both “enjoyed similar premature glory, and how did they work
out?”
To summarize, our analysis distinguishes between articles that focus on the horserace
and those that focus on issues, assuming that greater concentration on issues (compared to
the content of domestic coverage) is an indicator of higher quality. And we identify the
particular frame within which an article is crafted, which suggests its slant and gives
some indication of the foreign media’s pressing concerns and the worldview they promote.

The content and quality of foreign media coverage of Trump’s rise

Our examination of the coverage of Trump’s rise in The Australian and The Guardian
reveals that horserace coverage was the dominant theme in approximately 44 per cent
of articles from these outlets.6 Thus, the majority of articles (56 per cent) concentrated
on discussion of “issues”, including analysis of Trump’s economic policy proposals and
what his campaign suggests about democracy in America and the country’s international
relations. In contrast, studies of the domestic coverage of presidential nominating cam-
paigns consistently show that “By far, the dominant frame in campaign news coverage
is … the game schema” (Steger 2015, 72; see also Norrander 2010, 93). The domestic cov-
erage in the case of Trump’s rise was also horserace-centred, with discussion of issues
making up only about 11 per cent of coverage (Patterson 2016b, 7).
These observations suggest that the presentation of Trump’s rise in the foreign media
articles that we analysed was markedly different from the coverage of his rise in the dom-
estic media. This is because, as we explained earlier, there are reasons why the foreign
media who report on politics in a friendly, “away” country are likely to produce higher-
quality reporting than the domestic media who cover politics at “home”. We suspect
that if the domestic media reporting of Trump’s rise had looked more like the foreign cov-
erage, the overall standard of media coverage would have been higher – in other words, it
would have aligned more closely with fourth estate ideals. But domestic reporting operates
under different, and generally more severe, constraints than foreign reporting.
Using the criteria that were proposed earlier, we can go beyond the horserace/issue dis-
tinction to identify the frames at work in the articles. The prominence of these frames is
summarized in Table 2 below. As shown in the table, the most prominent frame within the
issue category, and also the most prominent within the whole sample, was the one that
captured journalists’ discussion of Trump’s policy proposals. While the domestic media
have been criticized for paying too little attention to the question of how a Trump presi-
dency would impact on the direction of public policy, the foreign outlets that we analysed
zeroed in on this theme. For instance, they attacked Trump’s anti-environmentalism, as
revealed by his “veiled shots at those who are concerned about global warming”; his pol-
icies on gun control, which had racist overtones; his “appalling” proposal to require
Muslim American to carry special identification; his support of waterboarding (“a tech-
nique widely denounced as torture”); and his “flip-flops” on economic policy (Jacobs
14 Z. NWOKORA ET AL.

Table 2. The composition of foreign media coverage.

Frame
Class Subclass Number of Articles Number of Words Word Count (Mean)
1: Race 1a: Talking up 188 (22%) 185,747 988
Trump candidacy
1b: Talking down Trump candidacy 189 (22%) 178, 963 946
2: Issue 2a: Authenticity of Trump 36 (4%) 40, 028 1,112
2b: Trump and American democracy 69 (8%) 79, 094 1,146
2c: Trump and particular groups 83 (10%) 69, 610 839
2d: Trump’s policies 210 (25%) 193, 206 920
2e: Trump in international relations 79 (9%) 59, 012 747
TOTAL 854 (100%) 805, 660 943

2016; Beckett and Siddiqui 2016; Dove Kent 2015; Pilkington 2015; Kasperkevic and
Helmore 2016).
Even though issue-centred coverage dominates the sample as a whole, the second and
third most frequently observed frames are those that capture the horserace-centred frames
(i.e. frames 1a and 1b). In fact, combining these latter categories, it becomes clear that
horserace-centred articles in the sample actually outnumber those that focus squarely
on Trump’s policy proposals (2d). But, crucially, about one third of the articles discuss
the other issue-related themes: Trump’s interactions with particular social groups (2c);
Trump’s pronouncements about other countries and statements from abroad about
Trump’s candidacy (2e); critical evaluations of the state of American democracy (2b);
and generally positive endorsements of Trump’s authenticity in contrast to the perceived
dysfunction of Washington politics (2a).
Perhaps more than the other issue frames, the articles on international relations and
those evaluating American democracy aired issues that were unlikely to receive much
attention in the US domestic press. We view these articles as especially clear evidence
that foreign correspondents, reporting from an away location, cater to a peculiar home
audience of foreign policy players who need to be more knowledgeable about US politics
than the typical citizen, but seek analysis that also informs their understanding of their
own country. For example, an article in The Australian, published in early June 2016,
when Trump’s victory in the primary race was all but confirmed, argued that “our regional
interests could be significantly damaged by a President Trump” (Sheridan 2016). In a
number of articles, Trump’s rise was used as a platform to assess the state of democracy
not only in America, but in the home country too, and sometimes in other countries as
well. For instance, an article in The Australian, published on 15 August 2015, compared
Trump’s apparently soaring prospects with the “utterly horrific” possibility of Jeremy
Corbyn becoming British Prime Minister (Sheridan 2015). These developments, the
article concluded, were “a sign of the widespread derangement in Western politics
today”, including in Australia.
We have so far treated the two non-American outlets collectively, in order to explore
our argument that their foreignness resulted in coverage that was quite different from
that supplied by the US domestic media. However, it is also important to understand
how The Australian and The Guardian diverged in their reporting of Trump’s political
rise. Figure 1 summarizes the reporting slant of these newspapers as indicated by what
proportion of their articles were coded in each of the content frames. As noted earlier,
 POLICY STUDIES 15

Figure 1. Comparing the content of foreign media coverage.

coverage of the horserace (frames 1a and 1b) was identical across the newspapers. But The
Australian devoted comparatively more attention to the issue of Trump’s authenticity (2a)
and Trump’s relations with social groups (2c), while The Guardian was more interested in
the potential implications of Trump’s rise for international relations (2e) as well as his
public policy proposals (2d).

Foreign media coverage of the different stages of the race

Although horserace-centred coverage dominated the domestic reporting of the Republican
primary season as a whole, there was significant variation in this bias over the course of the
race. The US media’s concentration on the horserace aspect was “heavy” during the early
primaries and caucuses (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina), with over 90
per cent of articles on Trump focusing on horserace-related stories (Patterson 2016b, 11).
But concentration on this aspect peaked during the two weeks around “Super Tuesday”,
16 Z. NWOKORA ET AL.

when eighteen states held contests. As Patterson (2016b, 14) explains, “At no point in the
campaign did vote projections, tabulations, and assessments so thoroughly dominate cov-
erage as during the Super Tuesday period”. In that time, only about 5 per cent of domestic
media articles concentrated on issue-related themes. In the stage after the Super Tuesday
period, when fourteen states held Republican contests, “the horse race got less press atten-
tion” (Patterson 2016b, 18). Trump received less positive coverage as a consequence. This
shift intensified during the final month of the primary season, when Trump’s lead became
unassailable. Now, “journalists increasingly probed Trump’s character and policy pos-
itions, framing them through the lens of Trump as a possible president rather than
Trump as a striving candidate” (Patterson 2016b, 21). Nonetheless, articles focusing
squarely on issue content still made up only one fifth of those published in the domestic
press.
Were there also differences in the content of foreign media coverage across the stages of
the race? To investigate this question, we divided the Republican primary season into four
stages; each included significant political events and there was a reasonably even distri-
bution of articles across the stages.7 The first stage captures the time before the official
start of the race – that is, the so-called “invisible primary” – and began on 16 June
2015 and ended on 31 January 2016. This stage includes 315 articles (37 per cent of
total). The second stage (122 articles) spans from 1 February 2016 until 14 March 2016
and includes the Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada contests, as well as
five GOP candidate debates. This stage includes the run-up to, and the aftermath of,
Super Tuesday on March 1. The third stage (146 articles) runs from 15 March 2016
until 30 April 2016, and it includes the other Super Tuesday (i.e. “Super Tuesday II”)
on March 15, when contests were held in six states. The fourth stage (271 articles) captures
the remainder of our sampling period, from 1 May 2016 until 22 July 2016, and includes
the Republican National Convention.
As shown in Figure 2 below, there are noticeable differences in the focus of foreign
media coverage across these stages of the primary race. In the earliest stage, the policy
frame (2d) was most prominent and accounted for 25 per cent of foreign media coverage
during this period. The media also focused heavily on the horserace frames (1a and 1b)
and these received only slightly less prominence than the policy frame; in combination,
they actually account for more of the coverage than the policy frame on its own. But
the media also devoted a modest amount of attention to Trump’s relations with social
groups (2c) and, to a lesser extent, the three other issue frames (2a, 2b and 2e), which
meant that approximately 53 per cent of the articles during this stage had an issues
concentration.
A similar balance can be observed during the second stage: the policy frame is again
most prominent and even more so than during the first stage; the two horserace frames
are less prominent than during the first stage, but together they are still more prominent
than the policy frame; while the other, minor issue frames make a small, but not insignifi-
cant, contribution. This balance shifts during the third stage as more commentary “talks
up” Trump’s candidacy. The 1a frame, which captures this concentration, is the most pro-
minent one during this period. The policy frame (2a) features less during this third stage
than at any other time in the race. By the fourth stage, however, it is again the most domi-
nant frame. The horserace-related themes continue to be important during this stage, but
now the “talking down” Trump’s chances frame (1b) makes up a larger component of the
 POLICY STUDIES 17

Figure 2. Foreign media coverage over time.

coverage than the “talking up” frame (1a); this captures the large number of articles during
this stage which offered (generally pessimistic) assessments of Trump’s chances in the
forthcoming presidential election.
This examination of coverage over the course of the race reinforces the general results
we presented earlier, and the differences we identified between foreign and domestic cov-
erage of Trump’s rise. Most importantly, as a result of this additional analysis, we can now
say that issue-centred coverage not only dominated overall but also that it dominated all
four stages of the race. The policy frame (2d) was the single most prominent frame overall
and during three out of the four stages of the race. The horserace-centred coverage was
prominent throughout the primary season, but never more so than the total coverage
accorded the various issue categories.
Interestingly, within the class of horserace-centred articles, the balance between articles
that “talked up” Trump and those that “talked down” fluctuated across the four stages in
ways that were quite different from the domestic coverage over time. As reported by Pat-
terson (2016b), positive, horserace-centred articles on Trump were especially prominent
around Super Tuesday, which corresponds to the second stage of our analysis; but in
our sample, articles of this type were most prominent slightly later, during the third
stage. This suggests that foreign correspondents were not only less obsessed with the
horserace aspect, but also that when they did discuss the state of the race they were
slower to reach the conclusion that Trump would win.

Conclusion
This article has argued that the foreign media who report on friendly countries are a dis-
tinctive group of journalists who are well-positioned to conduct unusually high-quality
reporting. Their foreignness from the country they are covering insulates them from
18 Z. NWOKORA ET AL.

some of the pressures that impact on the quality of domestic news. At home, the group of
foreign correspondents are likely to be peripheral to their organization’s core business, but
viewed as a high status club, which gives them substantial autonomy within their organ-
izations. Due to these conditions, foreign correspondents have greater opportunity to do
“proper journalism” – meaning they can more easily strive for fourth estate standards of
practice – than their colleagues who report on their home country’s domestic politics.
Indeed, since the pressures to drive down the quality of domestic news continue show
few signs of abating (see e.g. Blumler and Coleman 2015; Blumler and Kavanagh 1999),
the gap we detect between the quality of domestic and foreign news may become more
pronounced.
Although this is a novel account of media politics, it resembles the more general, and
much older, argument that foreign observers are often perceptive analysts of a country’s
politics. Alexis de Tocqueville’s commentary on eighteenth-century American political
life, Democracy in America, is perhaps the most obvious example of this: Tocqueville, a
French observer, analysed American democracy at a time when France was America’s
closest ally; and his book’s combination of sensitivity to the American political context,
but also detachment from it, align in important respects with the ideals of fourth estate
journalism. Of course, there are stark differences in terms of the forms of publication
that are available to observers now compared to two centuries ago, and America’s political
and geostrategic circumstances have also transformed in that time. But, nonetheless, the
foreign media (from friendly countries) might reasonably be considered the inheritors
of this Tocquevillian role and the perspective it entails.
Our account of media politics also raises questions which this article has not engaged.
One line of inquiry concerns the generalizability of our account. Trump’s rise was useful
for illustrating the theory and its relevance to a real-world circumstance; and confirmed
that it can account for an important (and otherwise difficult to explain) observation:
the much greater focus on issue coverage in the foreign newspapers we examine than in
the domestic media, as reported in previous studies. But a more rigorous testing strategy,
involving analysis of a large number of cases, will be needed in order to be more confident
in our conjecture, to gain a clearer sense of when it does and doesn’t hold, and to tease out
and test the influence of the various drivers behind our conjecture. Our account also raises
questions about fourth estate theorizing. It suggests, in particular, that media activity
beyond a country’s borders can contribute to a better understanding of its politics. If
this is the case, there may be significant value in a country’s citizens seeking out foreign
outlets to gain better quality news.

Notes
1. Ironically, as Blumler and Kavanagh (1999, 213) note, more open-minded citizens in need of
high-quality information have often had to consume a form of political communication that
is “emptier and less nourishing”.
2. The Trump White House has been accused of such behaviour (Borchers 2017).
3. Consistent with this hypothesis, Blumler and Kavanagh (1999, 216) note that the adminis-
tration of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair suspected it received fairer treatment from the
foreign press, given the “cynical obsession of Britain’s national press with trivia, scandal,
and negativity … ”
 POLICY STUDIES 19

4. The articles of this type resonate with arguments in the populism literature linking the char-
isma of populist leaders to perceptions of their authenticity. For example, Stanley (2008, 105)
explains that “invocation of authenticity and ordinariness is a key aspect of populism’s appeal
to the people, as it allows populists to lay claim to genuine representativeness”. Similarly, in
Canovan’s (1999, 14) treatment, populist leaders are “vivid individuals who can make politics
personal and immediate instead of being remote and bureaucratic”.
5. Hadley Freeman, “Don’t Worry, Donald Trump won’t win. But I’ll sure miss him when he’s
gone”.
6. There was no difference between the outlets in this regard: 44 per cent of The Australian
articles concentrated on the horserace aspect, and so did 44 per cent of The Guardian articles.
7. These stages do not correspond perfectly with the division in Patterson’s study.

Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge that funding for this research was provided by the Alfred
Deakin Institute at Deakin University, Australia. We also thank Tristan Galloway and Peter Mul-
herin for their research assistance.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by Alfred Deakin Institute Research Grant.

Notes on contributors
Zim Nwokora is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Policy Studies at Deakin University. His research
concentrates on Comparative Politics, with a focus on elections, political parties, and constitutions
and has been published in outlets such as American Politics Research, Constellations, Parliamentary
Affairs, Party Politics, and Political Studies. He completed his doctorate in Politics at the University
of Oxford in 2010 with a dissertation on the American presidential nominating process. Email:
z.nwokora@deakin.edu.au.
Benjamin Isakhan is an Associate Professor of Politics and Policy Studies and Founding Director of
POLIS, a research network for Politics and International Relations in the Alfred Deakin Institute for
Citizenship and Globalization at Deakin University, Australia. He is also an Adjunct Senior
Research Associate, Department of Politics and International Relations, Faculty of Humanities at
the University of Johannesburg. Email: benjamin.isakhan@deakin.edu.au
Chengxin Pan is an Associate Professor of International Relations at Deakin University, and a co-
editor of the Global Political Sociology series (Palgrave Macmillan). He has published in journals
such as the European Journal of International Relations, International Relations of the Asia-
Pacific, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Journal of Contemporary China, and the
Pacific Review. Email: chengxin.pan@deakin.edu.au.

ORCID
Zim Nwokora https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2171-9319
Benjamin Isakhan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5153-7110
Chengxin Pan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9771-7563
20 Z. NWOKORA ET AL.

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